UNDERNEATH THE CANOPY 9A by Karin HauserSECOND PLACE(Click on image for larger view)

Curator Ellen Jantzen says, "I chose Karin Hauser’s “Underneath The Canopy #9” as the second place-winning image.
This is a visually compelling image and through the selection process I kept coming back to this piece and was intrigued with the juxtaposition of lungs to branches of a tree. Trees are considered the “lungs of the earth”, so the superimposing of human lungs over tree branches is meaningful to me. The orientation is unique too, with the branches hanging down."

Karin Hauser says, "'Underneath The Canopy' is a series of 10 photographs that are inspired by my developing interest in The Garden as a metaphor for active caring and healing. This is a garden quite unlike the Garden of Eden, the utopian paradise where everything is provided but a garden that requires attentiveness. I use the visual device and aesthetics of symmetry as a means to evoke the emotional experience of bonding to and separation from nature and the other."

Karin Hauser, is a German-Australian artist who primarily works in photo-media. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Tasmanian School of Art in 1983 and in 2005 received a Masters in Studio Arts with Honours from the University of Sydney. She lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

Karin Hauser’s carefully constructed photographs establish an approach to reality that opens a contemplative space, through which the world might be re-imagined in less ordinary ways. Her work aims to dissolve the relationship between the inner and the outer, between subject and object, and through which human vulnerability is given particular resonance.

Her work has been exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, at the Hamburger Kunstverein, Germany and the see|me exhibition space in NYC.

She was a finalist in the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Award (2007) and received Honourable Mention at the International Photography Awards (IPA) in 2013 and 2015. In 2017 her work was shown alongside the 57th Venice Biennale as part of the IV Biennal Project. She has received grants and fellowships from the Australia Council and Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board, including an Australia Council Studio Residency in Italy.